


Kitchen-Sized

by Mosca



Category: Lumberjanes, The Great British Bake Off RPF
Genre: Baking, Gen, Neurodiversity, Ripley saves the day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 06:02:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10984875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: When an attempt at a three-layer meringue ends in dessert catastrophe, Ripley becomes Roanoke's only hope of earning the Advanced European Baking badge.





	Kitchen-Sized

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovessong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovessong/gifts).



> Happy belated birthday to Lovessong! I hope this is the crossover you didn't realize you needed in your life.
> 
> Many thanks to Amy for looking this over.

Nobody would let Ripley help the rest of Roanoke earn the Advanced European Baking badge. They kept saying she wasn't to be trusted with hot ovens, knives, or delicious batters containing raw eggs. Ripley reminded Jo that she'd often saved the day in much more dangerous situations, and Jo sent her off to a corner to sift flour. She reminded Jen that her sweet tooth was the sharpest at the entire camp, and Jen reassured her patronizingly that she could serve as chief taster when the treats were complete. She appealed to Molly's sense of fairness by offering to help with the dishes, but Molly frowned and stammered like she was trying not to admit she thought Ripley would only make a mess.

Ripley had learned that ideas that sounded logical in her mind got garbled and strange on the way to her mouth, and that sometimes no matter what she did, people didn't understand why her ideas were good. At home, that had meant several years of drawing elaborate pictures in the back row of the Special Talents class before her parents had switched her to a school with uniforms and a routine of tiny yellow pills. The uniforms were itchy, and the pills made her stomach feel awry sometimes. But at her new school, she got to do technology labs and nature investigations, and to choose her own books to read, and to practice martial arts in the mornings. It wasn't so bad.

She wondered if her new school would let her try a baking elective in the fall. They let you do almost anything if you wrote a good proposal, and when Ripley had time to write, she could stop and make the words sound logical. Then she could come back next summer and show her friends some truly advanced baking.

“Jumping Julia Child!” April cried, and Ripley ran over to see what the matter was. It was a disaster indeed. The three-tier meringue had collapsed under the weight of the fruit between its layers like a deadly seismic event, with a lava of strawberry sauce pooling malevolently at the edge of the dish.

“I still want to eat it,” Ripley said, trying to console her.

Mal snapped, “Don’t touch it.”

“We’ll never get the badge now,” April sulked. “We have to move on to Lumber Sports tomorrow.”

Molly wheeled the trash can to the counter, but Jen stopped her. “Ripley is right. It looks delicious. Too messy for a badge, but fine to serve for dessert.” Ripley grinned, but the girls still nudged her aside when she tried to help them tidy the kitchen and wrap up the meringue-quake.

“All right, time for swimming,” Jen announced. “Oh, except for Ripley. You still have another day in the crafts cabin before you can go in the water.”

Ripley picked at the edge of the bandage on her shin, the result of a failed experiment involving crab apples, sprayable sunscreen, and the campfire. While the other girls skipped back to Roanoke to change into their swimsuits, Ripley stared out the window, across the soccer field, toward the crafts cabin. Crafts weren’t as much fun as swimming, but she’d get to work on the longest lanyard in camp history - she was close to the 50-foot mark. On the other hand, the kitchen was auspiciously quiet, since it was too early for the kitchen staff to start making dinner. She had the rest of the summer for her record-breaking lanyard, but if she didn’t earn the Advanced European Baking badge today, Roanoke would have to wait until next year. And who knew what would become of them by then?

The other girls had left the printed-out booklet of badge-eligible recipes on the edge of the sink, as if tempting it to drown itself. Ripley rescued it and flipped to the instructions for the three-tier almond praline meringue with strawberry sauce and seasonal fruit. There weren’t terribly many ingredients, but the recipe tested a multitude of techniques and demanded careful timing. It was the sort of challenge that most often defeated Ripley, and that was why she approached it with such gusto.

The first step was to separate eggs, then beat the whites into peaks. When Ripley opened the cupboard to get out the electric hand mixer, two medium-sized women crawled out, dusted themselves off, and stood akimbo, like superheroines. Ripley yelped and crouched like a frog in a corner of the kitchen. But the two women looked friendly, so Ripley stretched out her limbs and her courage. She had lots of experience dealing with scarier magical creatures than these. She thrust out a hand. “I’m Ripley.”

“She’s Mel,” the dapper one with the spectacles said, pointing at the appealingly disheveled blonde one. 

“And that’s Sue,” Mel said, also pointing, and pausing as if for laughter. “What are you?”

“A Lumberjanes Scout,” Ripley said with pride.

“We’re brownies,” Mel said.

“You’re too big!” Ripley said.

“I think we’re just the right size, don’t you, Mel?” They turned to each other and whispered briefly. “Yes, we’ve agreed. We’re cupboard-sized in the cupboard and kitchen-sized in the kitchen.”

“But if you’re usually cupboard-sized, why embiggen now?” Ripley asked.

“We smelled something delicious and couldn’t help ourselves,” Mel said.

“I haven’t started yet,” Ripley said.

“Yes, well, we’ve smelled how it’s _about_ to be,” said Sue. “That’s how smells work sometimes.”

The brownies watched as Ripley separated the eggs, using a technique with two tablespoons that Molly had taught the rest of Roanoke a few days earlier. She remembered to separate into a small bowl before adding the whites to the big bowl, in case she broke a yolk, which she did, but only once. The whir of the electric beater yanked at her elbow, and the creamy peaks of beaten egg looked more like her grandma’s face cream than food.

Ripley had forgotten the almonds. The brownies were just standing there, so she asked if they could hand the bag to her.

“Nope,” Mel said.

“Can’t help,” Sue said.

“Well, we can do some things,” Mel said. “Hold a bowl, for instance.”

“Or eat. We can always help eat. We are, in fact, exceptionally talented at eating. Would you like a demonstration?” Sue grabbed an apple, possibly from thin air, and munched it expertly.

“But no mucking about with ingredients or steps or timers or machines,” Mel said.

“What would happen to you if you _did_ help?” Ripley asked, hoping for gruesome violence.

Sue said only, “Horrible things,” and the two brownies shuddered in unison.

Ripley searched the kitchen for almonds, but her cabin-mates must have used them up. The closest thing she could find was a jumbo jar of cashew butter. She pondered it and the bunches of bananas turning brown on the counter. It would be going far off recipe to caramelize them together into a sauce, but that was an optional technique for the badge. When Ripley discovered that her friends had also used all the strawberries and raspberries, but bypassed two pineapples and an extra-large papaya, her plan came together.

“I sense a tropical storm brewing,” Sue said.

“A meringue luau,” Mel added.

Ripley rearranged her new ingredients vexedly. Even at her new school, she received Requires Intensive Support for time management. It wasn’t her fault that the watch on her wrist went whatever speed it wanted, without regard for how long it took to do things or how ready she was for them to be over. In frustration, she banged a drawer open and shut. When the force of her consternation rebounded it open again, she saw that it contained a box of stopwatches, possibly earmarked for the upcoming pie-eating relay race. Or put there by brownie magic, although they’d never admit it.

Ripley lined up the stopwatches and set each one for the amount of time a different task would need. She looked forward to the cacophony of beeping. In the wobbly, nervous stretches of time when they weren’t going off, she sang songs. She cut fruit with sharp knives, reduced the sauce over a flaming stove burner, and fortified her willpower for a whole hour while the baked meringue cooled. She practiced her best defensive punches and kicks when she felt tempted to taste it. The brownies copied her, awkwardly at first, although they were pretty good by the time the final stopwatch went off.

Ripley lifted the tray of cooled meringue layers from the fridge, astonished that they hadn’t cracked. The banana-cashew sauce had turned out viscous and glossy, cement to keep the meringue tower from collapsing. Ripley took her time balancing the layers and arranging the wedges of pineapple and papaya. She was placing the last few fruit pieces when Mal burst into the kitchen. “Ripley! We’ve been looking everywhere! There were going to be search parties. I got sent here for provisions.”

Ripley hopped aside so Mal could see her creation. “I made a cake,” she said.

“By the knives of Stephanie Izard!” Mal exclaimed. “Run to the field house and tell Jen you’re all right. I’ll stay here and - you cleaned up, too?”

Ripley hadn’t done any of the cleaning. The kitchen should have been a slippery maelstrom of dirty utensils and sticky drips. Instead, it was spotless. Ripley looked up at the brownies, who stood smugly by the sink. “We’re allowed to tidy up,” Mel said.

“Who are they?” Mal asked. “Did they help you?”

“They’re not allowed. Except with eating. And cleaning, I think. Also, they’re kitchen-sized brownies, because they’re in the kitchen. If they went outside, they’d be giant brownies, because nowhere is bigger than outside.”

“We’ve never been outside, come to think of it,” Sue said. “Maybe that’s why.”

“Can you guard the meringue while we get Jen?” Ripley asked the brownies. “If there’s a search party, I don’t want to be left out.”

“We don’t need a search party if you’re found,” Mal said, but when Ripley made a sad face, she added, “but maybe it would be fun to go on one anyway. Search parties are just parties when there’s nobody missing.”

By the time Mal had changed her mind about search parties, the brownies had conferred. “We’d like to guard your luau, but we have one hesitation,” Sue said.

“Only a tiny one.” Mel pinched her fingers together to show how tiny it was. “We can’t promise we won’t eat it.”

“Have we mentioned that we’re exceptionally talented at eating?” Sue fished two chocolate chip cookies from her pocket and handed one to Mel, who bit into it merrily.

Mal didn’t miss a beat. “If we give you another meringue instead, will you leave this one alone? It’s a wreck, but it should taste good.” Mal got the first meringue attempt out of the fridge to show them.

The brownies grinned with approval. “Smells like hard work,” Sue said. “We’ll leave the luau alone.”

Mal and Ripley raced each other to the field house. Mal won, but it was close. It took a few moments for Rosie to notice Ripley and cancel the search. “Where _were_ you?” Jen scolded as she hugged Ripley.

“In the kitchen,” Ripley said. “Everyone was so disappointed about having to give up the badge and move on to Lumber Sports, and I thought, since I couldn’t do swimming and I’m so good at eating desserts, maybe I could follow a recipe if I had enough stopwatches and nobody was there to tell me to get out of the way.”

Jen led Roanoke to the kitchen. The brownies had guarded Ripley’s meringue in exemplary fashion. They’d dug into the wrecked meringue with aplomb but left plenty behind for the girls to enjoy. Ripley saw no other sign of them, aside from the spotless kitchen.

All anyone else paid attention to was Ripley’s luau meringue. “Divine,” Molly said.

“I could only do it right because we practiced doing it the wrong way first,” Ripley said. “Can we eat the wrecked one now?”

Jen said, “I don’t think there’s any reason for the other campers to know it even existed.”

As Ripley got spoons for her friends, two drawer-sized brownies scooted between the utensils and waved goodbye.


End file.
